Tag: Video

So, instead of posting on the blog, I’ve been directing my words onto the page, and cracking on with the book.

I – sorry, what? Oh, that’s sweet of you to ask, it is going pretty well, thanks. I’m on track to finish the first draft by Halloween, which avoids me (for the gazillionth time) claiming I’ll be using National Novel Writing Month as a springboard to finish it off, and then losing focus after a week or so. As I write longhand, my plan is to use November and December to type it up and re-draft, at which point I’ll be passing it to those brave folks who have agreed to read the draft and comment, before slinging it out into the world and seeing how it fares.

Those of you who’ve followed my intermittent blogging over the decades (okay, I exaggerate, but it seems that way sometimes, I know) will be all too aware that this book has taken a frankly ludicrous amount of time to get done – completely at odds with my intentions, and very much a case (as Mr O’Boogie put it) of “what happened while I was making other plans”. Then again, in a way, having carried the story in my head for so long has been useful because it’s allowed me extra time to consider bits of it and look at the angles. Well, that’s my after-the-event justification anyway.

One thing I will share, though, which is probably the key knowledge this experience has given me, and which may be useful to anyone reading this who’s in the middle of thinking about writing a book, in the midst of doing so, or anything like that: books on ‘how to write a novel’ often have lots of pages talking about character traits and story and subplot and dialogue and structure and POV and all that kind of thing, but without a shadow of a doubt the main difficulty I’ve found in getting the thing out of my synapses and onto the page has been the simple one of finding the time.

If you don’t set the time aside regularly and deliberately, then – just like saying you’ll start saving with whatever money’s left at the end of the month – you’ll find that it just doesn’t get done. Like exercise or reading or anything that takes time, writing needs you to allocate time to it, and then to use that time as well as you can. I know this sounds basic – and it is – but I’ve read so many books about writing over the years, and so many of them seem to assume that people are approaching the idea of writing a book with the mindset of ‘something I’d like to do, but I just don’t have any ideas for a story I want to tell or the characters who will move through the story’, when my experience (and that of a lot of people I’ve spoken to) is less a case of not having the basic idea, but struggling to eke out the time to set pen to paper (or finger to keyboard, as the case may be).

So that’s probably the key thing I’ve realised from writing this book: make sure you have time to write, and if necessary set that time aside, because chances are there will always be other people or events or mishaps or things which will cheerfully take the time instead, and leave you with the story loitering at the back of your mind, like a nervous actor awaiting their cue; and that’s not what stories are for – they’re meant to be told, to be read (or heard) and shared. And that, I fear, doesn’t happen if it stays in your head.

And on that thought, I’ll get back to it. After all, I’ve got to wrestle with the problem of a homosexual nymphomaniac drug-addict involved in the ritual murder of a well known Scottish footballer, and … no, hang on, that’s not me, is it? It’s this chap: